


The False Shepard

by orphan_account



Series: After Crucible [7]
Category: Mass Effect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-18
Packaged: 2017-12-12 05:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At nine years old, she becomes the final survivor of The Reaper War. </p>
<p>A one-shot set 300 years after the Refusal Ending</p>
            </blockquote>





	The False Shepard

**Prelude.**  
There is life on Earth, but it isn't ours. 

Once, some might have argued that it's not even life, but there's nobody left to debate such an issue now; the same lifelessness that defines Earth is also true of Thessia, and Palaven, and Tuchanka, and every other piece of stone or steel that once sustained civilization. We're left with no higher form against which to compare the husks and therefore must redefine life as something less vital, less familiar, less desirable. 

It's not a new development. Earth has been fluctuating between some amalgamation of _home_ and _last bastion_ for the better part of the past two centuries. Ships would land or crash on its brutalized surface. People would scrounge for sustenance. Finding none, they would then leave, maybe, but usually they would give up and die. And so on and so forth until there was only a handful of lives left to lose.

In a way it's fitting that the last living person amongst all the eradicated races died beneath the same sun that burned behind the False Shepard as she chose not to destroy, or to control, or to synthesize, but to continue a war that had been lost from the beginning. 

Really though, it's nothing at all. 

**#1.**  
She is born on a ship beneath the sky to a woman whose bloodlessness has made her breathless, and to a man who died before he could learn how much different it felt to make a life than to take one. People circle her mother with open, shameless rapacity, allocating her room and her possessions and her rations while her warmth still dissipates into the air. This is how you survive, shipwrecked on Earth and trapped behind protocol-locked doors with resources that dwindle faster than hope. You shed your shame and you scavenge. 

Nobody cares when a turian enters the room. He's an outsider, a stray they met while gathering resources who they recruited as a fresh mind to apply to their old machinery. Nothing more, nothing less. He brushes the mother's sweat-clumped hair away from her face, feels for a pulse and for breath beneath her nose. Then he shuts her eyes, takes her bloody blanket, and swaddles her baby in its warmth. 

“You gonna take the kid, Darsius?” one of the men asks. 

“I figure I owe her mother a favour.”

“Oh yeah? Hey, you got a name picked out yet?”

Darsius smiles. “Jaina,” he says. “Like Jane. The False Shepard.”

**#2.**  
At five years old, Jaina doesn't know how grass feels between her toes and she can't comprehend the scent of fresh air or the feel of raindrops on her tongue, but she can fit her little fingers into the parts of the engine that Darsius cannot, and she's always teaching him new ways to laugh. She sleeps without nightmares but wakes asking about her parents, about death, about what exists behind the unmovable panels and thick black grease that covers the doors and windows. And because Darsius has all of the answers but can't find the way to make them palatable to the picky reality of a child, he says nothing. After a while, her curiosity hardens into confusion and she stops asking the tough questions, detaching herself little by little and day by day from the thought that there is more to discover about the universe and herself. 

Darsius doesn't know how to measure her happiness so he qualifies it in the rise of her smile and her innate ability to bring joy to the wrecked ship as it decays beneath the sun. In doing so, he becomes eternally happy for her. 

**#3.**  
At six years old Jaina scampers over to Darsius, who is busy studying the readings from life support, and says: “Guess what?,” affecting a slight vibration into her voice, a purr that tickles the back of her throat and makes her cough, just a little. 

“What?” Darsius asks, himself sounding a little more human, a little less turian. 

She reaches up to him, resting both hands along his jawline, under his mandibles, bringing a bit of a tickle to the softer parts of his flesh. “It's your birthday,” she says, and then she squeals into a giggle as his mandibles flap against her fingers. 

“It is?”

It's not. Or more accurately, it's not as far as he knows, though he supposes it very well could be. He was born on one of the last turian colonies, and it was so overwhelmed by battle that all the light was choked out of the sky by Reaper pressure and clouds of smoke and ash. People could barely tell whether it was day or night, never mind knowing the day or the month or the year, really. Even his age is an abstract notion to him; he knows that he's old enough to be elderly, but besides that he can only really quantify the passage of time through the established ages of the humans around him. Somehow, years still held meaning to them. 

Looking at Jaina, he almost understands why. 

“Uh-huh,” she says. “I decided.”

“And what exactly will my birthday entail?”

She bites down on her lip to stop her smile from stretching too far across her face, and says: “Presents!” before scampering over to her bed to retrieve his gift from under her pillow. 

A foreign feeling flutters against Darsius' ribs. Happiness? Comfort? Love? Excitement, he decides. Anticipation. He wonders if this is how people use to live, afloat in a stream of pleasantness, made buoyant by the lightening of their hearts. Then he thinks that maybe he's idealizing the past. Finally, he remembers that it doesn't matter; Jaina in front of him does. When she skips back over to him with a small, foil-wrapped bar in her hands, he raises his mandibles as high as he can and lets her laughter wash away his grief over a way of life he'll never know. 

“Here,” she says, and he takes his present. 

The wrapper crinkles in his hand. It has the substantial weight of a dextro nutrient bar but inside it's soft, like dust. On the front is a dark brown square and all around it myriad languages spell out the same thing – dark chocolate flavour. He's never had chocolate before; isn't even sure what it is, really, beyond its sweetness and now its brownness. Flavour is another turian casualty of the war. It's easier and more efficient to make bland pastes and bars and broths than to reintroduce variety to the palate, and it eliminates the frivolousness of taste. The humans don't share that particular sensibility. They indulge where they can. Hence, the present. 

“Where did you get this?” he asks, turning it over in his hands. On the back is an expiration date and he sucks in his breath as he checks and double checks the year. Before he can even think to stop himself, he's saying: “Oh, you've got to be kidding me.” 

Jaina's smile flickers into something sadder and she pulls away, just a little, just enough for the space she opens to create a vacuum of guilt between them. “It was in that room by the mess, the one with all the big machines,” she says, cautiously, unsure of how best to place her words. “Is that bad?”

Shit. He kneels down in front of her so they're eye-to-eye. Then he lifts his mandibles, waits for her to smile. He doesn't like that she's stopped, and he's not sure what to do when she only seems to slump further inward as though he's sucked the resolve from her muscle and the strength from her bones. 

“Of course it's not bad. Do you know how old this is?”

She shakes her head.

“Three hundred years,” he says after taking a moment to convert the turian calendar into the one used by the humans. 

Curiosity fluffs Jaina up to a happier state and she turns back towards him with wide eyes that offer only the barest indication that she still feels ashamed. “Is that older or … less older than you are?”

“A lot older. It must have belonged to the first people who owned this ship.”

“Who were they?”

“Nobody who wanted to be remembered,” he says, then adds, “Or so it seems,” because in all his time on the ship, the bar is the first thing he's seen that lends credence to their existence.

She lights up like an electric fire, all passion and power and spark, and says, “Do you think there's more?”

“Could be,” he says. “Only one way to find out.”

“Can I look now?”

“Just come back in time for dinner.”

She doesn't find anything else. The bar was a fluke; a lone glitch in a well calibrated disappearance, a clue without a trail to follow. 

**#4.**  
At seven years old, she witnesses a mutiny.

Darsius grabs her arms so hard that she can feel the pressure of his concern bruise her muscles, and he pulls her through the ship and down into engineering where he guides her into a small cubbyhole that's large enough to fit them both with an average degree of comfort. No moving around too much, but no forced contortion to ensure the continued existence of personal space. Both are grateful for that at first, each person shaking with adrenaline, with fear, with physical weakness, and neither one wanting to reveal the softening of their armour to the other. 

But soon the silence oppresses their pride, and Jaina curls into Darsius. He, in turn, wraps himself around her. 

“What's happening?” she asks, her voice a whisper. 

“Some of them want off the ship,” Darsius says, his own voice quieted. “But Commander Donnelly is refusing to open the door.”

“So they're fighting?”

“They're killing each other.”

“Oh,” she says, and then she doesn't say anything else. Instead, she quietly wonders who – if anybody – will be around when Darsius finally takes her back out from their cubbyhole, and how much more substantial her rations will be with fewer people around. 

When hunger and thirst drive them away from security 30-some hours later, ten out of the thirteen survivors have abandoned the grayness of the ship for the uncertainty of Earth, leaving behind the commander, his lover, and a woman named Katherine who had hurt her leg in the fray and was disallowed departure. By the time Darsius and Jaina arrive on the second deck to survey the damages, the airlock is well barricaded by large strips of metal soldered into place. Nobody in, nobody out. 

“Damn, Donnelly,” Darsius says. 

The commander shrugs. “You didn't see what was waiting for them out there.” 

**#4.5**  
Three months later, Katherine kills David as he sleeps and then kills Commander Donnelly while he cries over his body. She leaves Darsius and Jaina alone after that and they keep their distance from her. It's a big ship. For the most part, they manage.

**#5.**  
But at eight years old, she watches Katherine bite down on the barrel of a gun and pull the trigger. Blood pools around the woman's head and little bits of gray drip, drip, drip down the metal wall while Jaina wonders about the softness of the human skull. Until then, she had thought it hard and impenetrable, a vault of bone protecting the brain from damage, and she doesn't like losing that small comfort, that belief that a single part of her isn't weak and breakable. 

“Don't look,” Darsius says. He sounds tired and worn out and Jaina wonders how fragile he is, too. When she doesn't look away from Katherine, he sighs and wanders off to find something with which to cover the body while he moves it to the makeshift morgue in the hangar. When he comes back with shoulders slumped and mandibles tight against his jaw, Jaina concludes that he's broken in ways that rend him from inside out, ways that she may never understand, ways that might be worse than a bullet to the brain. 

She looks away from Katherine for him, and as soon as Darsius returns from the hangar she takes his hand in her own and doesn't let go until she's fast asleep. And even then she holds on just a little longer. 

**#6.**  
At nine years old, she becomes the final survivor of The Reaper War. 

Darsius is asleep when his body succumbs to time. It's a peaceful death, soft and warm and loving for Jaina's presence, and his mind is kind enough not to let him think on how she's perched on the verge of absolute loneliness. Instead, he dreams of an unobstructed sun shining in an aquamarine sky, and of a little girl with red hair and green eyes and a pretty blue dress, who spins and spins and spins until they're both dizzy with happiness. 

That same little girl lays on top of him, her face buried in the crook of his neck, her heart atop his. She can't feel its pale beats beneath the laboured rise and fall of his chest but she can feel his warmth bleed through her own skin, and inside that warmth she discovers just enough calm to weather the inevitability of isolation. 

There's nothing for her to do when he dies. Nobody to tell, no coffin to fill, nowhere to move him. No way to move him, either; she's so small and he's so large, and even though he's emaciated with illness, so too is she too weak to do much else but lay there with him until he's too cold, too stiff beneath her to be real. 

**#7.**  
The ship is well stocked with various and sundry weapons, most of which have grown useless from lack of use, some of which show promise, and one of which is viable enough to destroy the barricades Commander Donnelly built at the airlock. It turns like a key in Jaina's hands and demands all her strength to keep it steady but she perseveres. By the time the last metal plank falls, the final door is sliced up enough that she can squirm through if she angles her body just the right way.

She doesn't yet. She can't. Shrapnel has embedded itself in her body and she hurts too much to try. It's all right though. More than all right, really. From where she sits cradled against the makeshift door, she can see earth, smell earth, breathe earth into her lungs. Greens and whites and pinks and yellows obfuscate the grayness of the city stretched before her. For the first time ever, she watches wind move through the grasses and butterflies and bees flit between flowers plump with pollen and prettiness. She feels the sun. And though none of it makes sense to her, she relaxes into everything like a newborn into her mother's bosom because sometimes familiarity is innate, and the warmth she feels now is the very same that emanated from Darsius each time he smiled at her, or rested his hand on her head, or let her help him work on the ship. 

Excitement and fear bubble inside of her and she can feel them fizzing in her head. Whenever it comes to mind that she should get up and move, or take a closer look at the world splayed out before her, or pay attention to the strange staccato growls underlaid with mechanical tones, or wonder about the slightly human-shaped networks of white tubes spread across the ground – ten in total – she adjusts her thoughts so that she's only thinking about how nice it feels to be outdoors. 

Because it does feel nice. It feels so very, very nice. 

When she sees the blue steel turian approach the ship she doesn't feel afraid or even unsettled; it's a crescendo of relief that builds in her instead. He reminds her of Darsius. Of safety. Of love. 

“Hello?” she calls out. 

The marauder growls. He cocks his gun.

Jaina closes her eyes and breathes in as much of the fresh Earth air as she can.

* * *

**Fin.**  
”What do you think about the False Shepard?” the woman asks.

“To be honest, I don't think about her much at all,” Darsius answers. “Why?”

She folds her hands over the swell of her belly lets the little life inside kick away the tears that threaten to overwhelm the calm of her demeanour. “I was just thinking... she gave the people hope, right?”

“Yeah and then she threw it back in their faces.”

“I'm sure she had her reasons. And... that's not my point. Wouldn't you rather know hope and lose it than never know hope at all?”

“Hard to say, all considered.”

“If it's a girl,” she says, slowly, treating each word as if it's delicate, “I want to name her Jaina. Like Jane. It's different enough that people shouldn't mind, right? I just... I want to feel what hope is like and I think that maybe...”

“Hey,” Darsius says. “It's fine. I understand. And Jaina's a beautiful name.”


End file.
